ALFONSO OSSORIO (1916-1990)

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BIOGRAPHY
Alfonso Ossorio was born in Manila in the Phillippines to a wealthy sugar plantation owner. Throughout his childhood, he was educated in Catholic boarding schools in England. At the age of fourteen, he moved to the United States and continued his studies at Portsmouth Priory in Providence, Rhode Island. Three years later, in 1933, he became an American citizen. In 1934, Ossorio enrolled at Harvard University and was exposed to the artifacts of the Peabody Museum, a renowned resource for human cultural history. There, he met fellow artists Jared French, George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus and engraver Eric Gill, each who impacted his early artistic development.

In 1941, after spending three consecutive summers at Gill’s workshop in Sussex, England, Ossorio had his first exhibition at Betty Parson’s legendary Wakefield Gallery in New York City. From 1943 to 1946, he worked as a medical illustrator for the United States Army. Upon his discharge, he moved to New York City and continued his exploration of the aesthetic vocabulary of Surrealism. The artistic climate of New York in the 1940s proved fertile ground for inspiration, and Ossorio established crucial relationships with Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet. Appreciative of their ability as well as their companionship, Ossorio even began to collect their works.

In late 1951, after briefly returning to the Phillippines in 1950 to complete a mural commission and spending early 1951 in Paris with Dubuffet, Ossorio returned to the United States and purchased “The Creeks” in East Hampton, a sixty-acre estate he later called “the Eighth Wonder of the Horticultural World.” Ossorio remained there until the end of his life, and was a member of the thriving community of first and second generation Abstract Expressionists, most notably Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem and Elaine de Kooning.

Ossorio’s art can be found in numerous museum collections throughout the world including the Albertina Museum, Austria; Centre Pompidou, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In 1995 the Ossorio Foundation was established in Southampton, New York, to interpret and preserve the artist’s rich legacy.

KS

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